Green thoughts

Back when his friend J.R.R. Tolkien was grumping about the way people were reading all kinds of allegorical meanings into The Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis offered both sides a way out by drawing the distinction between allegory, which presumes to read an author’s intentions, and applicability, which is what the reader himself brings to his reading of an author’s work.

I wonder what Lewis– or, for that matter, Tolkien — would have had to say about the way the Iranian government is trying to keep people off the streets by broadcasting, among other things, a marathon of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, or the way people are subverting the government’s intentions by reading all kinds of unflattering meanings into the characters and situations.